


deo volente

by queen_edmund_pevensie



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 15x09, Angst, Episode: s15e09 The Trap, Gen, Hell Trauma, Hurt Sam Winchester, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sam Winchester Has Mental Health Issues, Sam Winchester Has PTSD, Season/Series 15, Supportive Dean Winchester, Trauma From Lucifer's Cage (Supernatural), anyway very excited to use my fave tag:, idk i still don't really know how to use this tagging system, the rare sighting of:
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-23 08:02:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30052410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queen_edmund_pevensie/pseuds/queen_edmund_pevensie
Summary: A million years ago, all Sam wanted to hear was Dean say those words. "Good enough for me." Now he wants to hear anything but that.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Eileen Leahy/Sam Winchester
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19





	deo volente

Like always, Dean’s attention flicks immediately to Sam. One second Dean is pushing himself off the ground, the next his face swims into focus in front of Sam’s eyes, his hands firm and rough and real around Sam’s arms keeping him upright. This is real — this is something that Sam can handle, Dean in front of him, Dean supporting him with both hands cupped around his face, looking into his eyes. All of it is familiar, even the panic, Dean’s panic, his own very distant panic. He’s forgetting something, he’s forgetting something important, but Dean is here — childishly, stupidly, in a way that he always wishes he could grow out of — he knows that everything will be okay. Dean is here. He’s giving him a once over, gingerly pulling his shirt away from the wound on his shoulder, hissing when he sees that nothing is there except blood, Sam’s blood, dried and sticky. But Dean doesn’t let his attention stay too long on Sam’s non-wound, the wound that’s gone. He directs all his attention back to Sam’s face, pushes Sam’s sweaty hair out his eyes, caresses his face with a calloused thumb. It’s familiar. It’s too familiar. Dean is here. Sam wants nothing more than let himself collapse into Dean’s arms, but he can’t. He’s forgetting something. Something important. 

_“Sammy — Sammy, hey, what’d he do to you?”  
_

Dean’s voice, gruff and panicked, snap him back into focus. Where he is _(a casino in Nebraska)_ , how he got here _(God captured them — God tricked them — God lured Eileen there on the false premise of a hunt; since she’d come back, she’d been antsy, ready to go, ready to help. She didn’t know. This wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t her —)_

“Eileen!” he gasps. “Where’s —?” 

“She’s fine, Sammy, hey, okay, everyone’s fine.” Dean assures him. _Everyone is okay._ Dean is looking directly into Sam’s eyes, he isn’t looking away, not even when he says, “Cas —Eileen.” Sam listens to Cas’s footsteps recede into the background ambient noises of this deserted casino, listens to Dean tell him everything is fine, that he’s okay. He doesn’t believe it. He hasn’t believed it in a long time. 

***  
  
Sam sits in the backseat with Eileen on the way home. She’s asleep. Sam isn’t. He’s exhausted, strung out. How long has he felt this way? Forever? Since his visions of the Cage started over four years ago? Since before that? He can’t — he’s suffocating. He needs Dean to pull the car over so he can get out and stretch his legs, but he can’t because Eileen is asleep on his shoulder. He would like that, maybe, under different circumstances, under circumstances where Eileen didn’t tearfully stick a scalpel into his shoulder and God didn’t show him endings that turn his stomach. Maybe at the next exit he’ll tell Dean he has to pee. He can see Dean watching him in the rear view mirror. They’re still on the interstate instead of back roads, because Dean is putting that stupid casino is their rear view mirror as fast as possible, because Sam basically collapsed back there, nearly broke down, and Dean is in a hurry to put this behind them. 

“Sammy?” Dean’s checking on him. He checks on him every thirty miles. Sam keeps track of it by the mile marker flashing by in the headlights of the Impala. Dean’s pushing 95, so it’s coming every twenty minutes or so. “You doin’ okay? We’re about to hit a rest stop, believe it or not. An honest to G — a real rest stop. I thought we’d stop.” 

“Yeah, sure.” Sam cranks the window, lets the night air wash over his face, likes the way that the air filling his lungs at 90 miles an hour makes it hard to take a deep breath, how it disguises how hard he’s breathing, but he doesn’t want to wake Eileen, so he doesn’t move. 

Dean does pull off the highway into the brightly lit parking lot. There’s hardly any cars, a couple of truckers sipping coffee, enjoying the last of the warm nights of the year while they can at picnic benches. Heading east. Dean’s pulling in to get gas. Cas gets out of the car and Sam jostles Eileen gently to wake her. She stares up at him. She’s shaken. Sam smiles, and he knows it’s more of a grimace. He wants — it doesn’t matter what he wants. 

The car door squeaks. Cas says that he feels bad, Sam squeezed in the back seat. Sam doesn’t say anything, just goes inside the the Honest to God Rest Stop, blinking in the warm light. In the restroom he splashes cold water on his face, bites his lip, and curses himself. There’s a possibility, a big one, that Chuck was lying. Or exaggerating, or telling Sam some version of the truth. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s been manipulated, had someone tell him it’s the only way. Show him something so real, make him believe and it’s a lie, or it’s an almost lie, or it’s — or it’s true. He doesn’t want to play their games anymore. He doesn’t know how to stop. 

_It’ll be better. It’ll be better._

Sam prayed for the first time since he came back from the Cage, and he thought — he really believed, he believed so much it hurt, deep in the bones Lucifer used to break — that God had finally answered his prayers. 

_It’ll be better. It’ll be better._

When Lucifer first started circling him, all those years ago, he showed up as Jess and said _I’d still be alive if it wasn’t for Dean. If it wasn’t for you_. He said, _You will always end up here_ , and then he made Sam say it, he said it when he pummeled Dean with Sam’s fists, made sure Sam could feel the bones of Dean’s face shatter, and he laughed. Sam had felt that laugh ripple through his body, saw Dean’s swollen face, saw Dean raise a feeble hand, felt the callouses of Dean’s fingers around his wrist, and told Dean, “What did I say? You will always end up here.” 

_It’ll be better. It’ll be better._

It has to be. It always has been. He and Dean have always clawed their way to a future that wasn’t so fucking bleak. They’re still alive, and if God wasn’t so spiteful and petty then the world would be okay. It would be okay, and it would be okay because he and Dean made it okay. No more Apocalypses. No more martyring themselves. 

It isn’t going to be better this time. Sam doesn’t have it in him. 

He grips the sides of the sink to stop himself from slumping over. Dean raps on the bathroom door because Dean hates public restrooms, and he doesn’t know what to say to Sam. “Let’s go, Sammy!” His voice is brash and gruff, and Sam takes another look at his wan face in the mirror and follows Dean back out to the car. 

*** 

She says, of all things, that she doesn’t know what’s real. He would laugh, almost, if he wasn’t so sure that laughing would trigger some kind of episode and he might start crying and never stop. So he takes her face in his hands and presses his lips to hers, closes his eyes, tries to ground himself in the sensation of a real kiss, not one fabricated to get him to tell secrets or manipulate him into saying yes to the Devil. Human and warm and awkward, and when he’s done he feels a little more solid and a lot sadder, because he knows it doesn’t change anything. They’ll all be dead or worse in a few months and it’s all because Sam doesn’t have another fight left in him. But he says, “This is real,” anyway, even though Eileen’s eyes are still closed so she doesn’t know he said it. 

Not that it would matter. Reality hasn’t meant very much to Sam in a long time. 

***

A million years ago, all Sam wanted to hear was _That’s good enough for me_. 

He doesn’t want to hear it now.

He keeps the lights off in his room, sits in the dark rubbing his hands against his jeans. The floor is cold against his bare feet. His back aches from sitting crunched in the backseat of the car and sitting so long in that chair as Chuck showed him his future. Their future. He’s trying to focus on that. The discomfort of being alive, but it’s getting harder.

He can feel it — his mind, wandering, slipping like water between the cracks in his skull. Nothing but his own face distorted and monstrous, flashes in quick succession — vampire, demon, Lucifer’s own glint behind Sam’s own eyes, Gadreel, Dean with the Mark and smirk squeezing the air from his lungs, Sam himself but without the feelings weighing him down letting Dean get taken by those vampires killing him himself if he had to, angry, so angry why is he so angry, he hasn’t been this angry in years, he hasn’t had the energy — angry at Lilith — she’s dead, or maybe she’s alive or maybe she’s dead. He killed her. He can’t remember. His eyes are black — he’s skinny and pale and sweaty and Dean’s got a death grip around his arms, around his shoulders, holding him like if he lets go Sam’s just going to float away. He’s pale and sweaty and he’s angry, he wants to kill Lilith, who’s dead, he wants to kill Lucifer, who’s dead, he wants to kill Ruby, who’s dead. He wants — he wants —

“Sammy?” 

Sam jumps. He never used to be so jumpy. Dean’s voice at the door, standing in threshold, the hall lights washing over him with some kind of angelic glow. He wants angels to be real. He never wants to see another angel again. Dean stands there staring at Sam, like he can see Sam trying to reassemble his memories, put himself back in time. Where he was this morning, yesterday. Where he’ll be when he wakes up tomorrow. 

“What time is it?” Sam croaks out before he’s got a great handle on any of these questions. This morning — he and Eileen were going on a hunt, driving to Nebraska. They thought it was vamps. This afternoon, Sam was turned into a vampire. Maybe. This afternoon, or after that, Sam saw himself turn into a vampire. He’s never sure about that last question. He swallows, looks up to see Dean flick his eyes to Sam’s alarm clock. 

“It’s four am, dude. You gotta get some sleep.” 

“I don’t —” Sam swallows, but he doesn’t know what comes next. He was going to tell Dean that he doesn’t think that he can sleep, but that’s patently untrue. He’s awake right now only because he’s still sitting up and he’s only doing that through sheer force of will. He wants to tell Dean that he’s fine, which is also a lie, the kind of lie that they are so used to telling each other, but it tastes like ash to even try, but he doesn’t want to tell Dean the truth either — that he doesn’t know how they’re going to get out of this one, that he doesn’t think they can, that sometimes, when he wakes up, warm and safe and comfortable in this dark little room, he forgets where he is and thinks he’s still in the Cage, and when the weight of what’s going on out here, in the real world, comes crushing down on him, so fast and so heavy that it knocks the wind out of him, and he wishes he was still in the Cage, because if he was there then at least Dean would be safe, and at least he would know that there was nothing at all for him to do. If he was in the Cage, then he wouldn’t have to do anything. If he was in the Cage then — well, well —well then that would be it. He’d have given enough. He’d have given all he was. He shudders involuntarily. “Chuck — he showed me something. He showed me our ending. Our deaths.” 

Dean is silent. Sam looks up at him, studies the creases in Dean’s tired face. He tries to pick out the features of his face that have been the same all their lives. The things about him Lucifer or his own diseased mind could never replicate. What even God couldn’t get right, in those other universes or drafts or versions of their end that Sam saw. His straight nose and wide green eyes. The frown lines he gets around his mouth now, the particular slant of his eyebrows when Dean think Sam has cracked up. It’s enough. For now it’s enough. What Chuck showed him isn’t real, and it won’t be, Sam won’t let it happen. 

“I thought —I thought well, it’s better than the other endings I saw.” He says it anyway, the thing he’s more ashamed of than anything else. That there was a kind of relief, selfish and horrible, at seeing Dean pinned down moments before he watched his own head get sawed off. At least they were together. At least he wasn’t alone, and at least Dean didn’t shove that stupid blade through his ribs, and at least Sam didn’t kill him, even if he did get them killed and get them both turned into monsters. 

“What?” Dean’s got his confused face on. His curious-but-a-second-away-from-fucking-with-him face. Another thing that as far as Sam knows only his Dean has and so another thing to catalog, to file away and hold onto for the mornings when he wakes up less certain. 

“It’s the monsters.” He can barely speak past the bile. In his memory, in his future, Dean begs him wearily to put the life behind them. He can’t. He doesn’t know how. He doesn’t know when Dean learned how. But people are dying and he knows it’s his fault, his fault for trapping God, for putting Dean before everything again and again, for starting the Apocalypse, for being fucking _born._ And it was _better._ It was better than the other endings. Getting turned instead of killed and getting put down like rabid dogs and going out together. It was better. “If Chuck isn’t around then they’ll take over. And if they take over, then we die.” Dean snorts, crosses his arms over his chest. Sam’s still leaving out the details. The important ones. “I mean we turn. Vampires.” Like the ones Chuck tricked Eileen into believing were off the interstate, like the ones who went feral in Apocalypse World and ripped his throat out. LIke the ones he threw Dean to. “And then — it’s not pretty.” 

“Oh.” Dean crosses the threshold, closes the door behind him. “Sam, we’ll figure this out. We always do.” 

Sam’s been staring at Dean the whole time, trying to keep him here, trying to get the image of other Deans out of his mind, but now he looks away. “What if we don’t?” His voice is small. He used to be able to yell so loud. Booming, get the neighbors to call the cops on them when he would fight with Dad late into the nights loud. Defiant, even in the Cage, at least at first. “What if he was lying and that was it? If that was our only way?” He wants Dean to tell him he was stupid for giving up their one chance, that Sam was confused, manipulated. Too damaged too broken to be thinking straight. 

“No,” Dean says shortly. He sits next to Sam on Sam’s bed, brushing shoulders but nothing more, like he knows that every nerve in Sam’s body is on high alert, that even this is too much or not enough. He doesn’t know, but he can’t move to try and fix it so it doesn’t feel like the part of his arm that’s brushing Dean’s isn’t a pathetic pin cushion. It’s a sensation he’s familiar with, metaphorically and literally and it’s something he needs to remedy but he’s too tired to figure out what to do about it. “I trust you. You’ve got good instincts, Sam.” 

Sam isn’t sure about that. He’s not sure of anything except for the way his hands and feet feel like ice and he has a crick in his neck that will be worse in the morning and the gravity of Dean sitting next to him. He’s trying to stay grounded in that — the sensations of _real life_ — but it’s getting harder to. It’s getting — it’s slipping away from him again. He wants this all to be a bad dream, a stupid trick that Lucifer is playing on him and soon he’ll get back to the pain and the more he wants it the easier it is to convince himself that it’s real, so he rubs his hands harder on his jeans, and Dean claps him on the back of the neck, which is startling — warm, solid, rough, all the things Dean is, all things so immediately obvious about Dean that they’re easy to replicate, but the way that Dean snakes his hand into Sam’s hair for just a moment isn’t so he comes back, for just a moment, to choke out, “I’m not sure,” and Dean seems to have had enough of that, run out of words to counter it, because Sam’s collapsed, folded like he’s made of paper, into Dean’s arms, and Sam is choking back a sob he’s been holding in since he first got strapped in that chair in that stupid fucking casino. 

“I am,” Dean says. Sam can’t look at his face, doesn’t want to. Wants to stay here, clutching fistfuls of Dean’s soft-worn shirt, and smell their detergent and Dean’s aftershave, and the muscles of his back tense under Sam’s arms. His eyes are squeezed shut, trying, unsuccessfully, to melt into Dean, so he can’t see Dean’s face when he says it, but he can feel him tense and relax, and he knows that Dean is lying. It doesn’t matter. When has that ever mattered? 

**Author's Note:**

> i see sam winchester suffering and i immediately am like...hmm we coulda had a whole episode just about That and also i'm filled with indescribable rage. 
> 
> Anyway, when I originally conceived this, it was About Bed Sharing, but in my second life as a supernatural fic writer I am trying to Hold Back and not spend so much time, like, woobifying Sam, which is Extremely Difficult bc when i see him i go: OH NO! SOMEONE GET THAT ADULT MAN A BLANKET! THAT HUMONGOUS ADULT NEEDS MY PROTECTION!! either way, yes, this does of course result in bedsharing but it is a hair to far for me to write it, but i want YOU to know that indeed, Dean simply holds sam until he falls asleep. and then in the morning they wake up and sam has a singular blissful moment of feeling safe. 
> 
> also if u read this on ff.net (where it is crossposted like all my fic) and u notice inconsistencies in italics, OH MY GOD.


End file.
